Michael Laverty was an early casualty at the US Grand Prix after crashing on the second lap of the 32 lap race.

The PBM rider crashed at turn two while battling with the leading CRT riders after making a fast start from 20th on the grid. Speaking after the race the Ulsterman was clearly disappointed to have had such a short race:

“I made a decent start and was in the group with Barbera and Edwards,” said Laverty. “I passed Barbera into turn three and then he got me back at turn five on the opening lap so I thought I’d try and not lose touch with him this time because losing time in the opening laps has hindered us in recent races when the bike was heavy. So I tucked in behind him and at turn two I wasn’t pushing very hard, not even as hard as the rest of the weekend, but I was probably caught out by a combination of the tyre not being up to temperature and the full fuel load putting extra weight on the front.”

Having qualified in 15th at the previous race at the Sachsenring it had seemed that the team had turned a corner and made progress with their chassis development but throughout the weekend Laverty had felt that he was struggling to get the most from the package as he learned the Laguna Seca circuit and competed with the FTR riders who have made considerable progress in recent races.

While the retirement was clearly a disappointed Laverty was pleased with the progress that his team had made over the weekend in fine tuning the setup and felt that a points finish was a possibility today due to the difficult track conditions that led to numerous retirements:

“It’s disappointing not to get very far in the race after making a good start and being with the top CRT guys. It’s frustrating because we could have scored some points with the amount of people that went out so that’s disappointing. We worked all weekend and improved the bike all weekend and the morning warmup was probably as good as the bike felt and I was doing mid 1m24s with full tanks. It’s disappointing not to see where we could have ended up.”